It is known in the prior art to provide a distributed computer environment comprising up to thousands of "nodes." Typically, the nodes are geographically dispersed and the overall environment is "managed" in a distributed manner. Often, the managed environment is broken down logically into a series of loosely-connected managed regions, each with its own management server for managing local resources. The management servers coordinate activities across the enterprise and permit remote site management and operation. In one particularly advantageous environment, known as a Tivoli managed environment, each management server serves a number of gateway machines, each of which in turn support a plurality of "endpoints." An important advantage of such distributed enterprise computing environments is that a system administrator may perform distributed configuration management tasks that affect all machines in the enterprise. As a consequence, it is an important goal of system providers to create distributed configuration management applications that are useful in such enterprises. Such applications could be used for many purposes, e.g., to manage users and groups, to keep endpoint configurations synchronized, to detect and resolve conflicts between endpoint configurations, to provide printer or file system configuration management, and the like. To date, however, there has been no efficient method for enabling application developers to quickly prototype, test, preview, code and modify distributed configuration management applications.
The present invention solves this important problem.